Some hospital patients have a tendency to roll out of a hospital bed. This presents a significant risk of injury. In the past, hospitals and other care facilities have used various types of restraints to secure such patients. However, patient restraints are no longer favored in the modern hospital environment. An alternate solution to this problem has been to employ a low profile bed thus locating the surface of the bed as close to the floor as possible. Yet, such a low profile bed must also be able to raise to a higher position so that doctors and nurses may have access to the patient. The arrangement of a very low profile bed typically places the actuators for raising and lowering the bed at a relatively shallow angle when the bed is in the lowered position. The actuator vertical force component available at such relatively shallow angles can become too small to lift the bed and the patient. This has limited the minimum height of mechanically actuated low profile hospital bed frames. What is needed is an arrangement which solves this problem and permits the design of a low profile hospital bed having a minimum height which is constrained not by actuator mechanics but by such considerations as the required thickness of frame members and wheel clearance.